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Reinventing History and Myth in Carlos Fuentes´S Terra Nostra and Ishmael Reed’S Mumbo Jumbo: Strategies for Teaching Postmodern Fiction in the Americas

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Reinventing History and Myth in Carlos Fuentes´S Terra Nostra and Ishmael Reed’S Mumbo Jumbo: Strategies for Teaching Postmodern Fiction in the Americas REINVENTING HISTORY AND MYTH IN CARLOS FUENTES´S TERRA NOSTRA AND ISHMAEL REED’S MUMBO JUMBO: STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING POSTMODERN FICTION IN THE AMERICAS La reinvención de la historia en Terra Nostra, de Carlos Fuentes y Mumbo Jumbo, de Ishmael Reed. Estrategias para la enseñanza de la ficción postmodernista en las Américas Santiago Juan-Navarro* Florida International University Abstract This essay explores the paradoxes of both Latin American Boom authors’ and U.S. American writers’ penchant for writing what came to be known as “total” novels by looking at two texts that are representative of the postmodern fiction produced in the 1970s: Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1974) and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972). By analyzing one of the most influential late-Boom novels (Terra Nostra) in the context of contemporary historical fiction, students will be able to understand the impact of the Boom beyond its Latin American borders and in connection with other literary traditions. Although the focus of the essay will be on reading the postmodern writers from an inter-American perspective, it will address issues that will be relevant to other pedagogical approaches as well: How does the Latin American Boom relate to the current postmodernism debate? What is its relationship with other subaltern traditions? How have the Boom novels impacted our concepts of history and myth? How can they be perceived from a transnational perspective? Keywords: postmodernism, comparative literature, inter-American fiction, total novel, history, myth, pedagogy of literature. * Área de Literatura Comparada, Departamento de Lenguas Modernas. Correo electróni- co: [email protected]. Fecha de recepción del artículo: 25 de mayo de 2012. Fecha de aceptación y version final: 26 de julio de 2012. STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 217-230 218 ][ Santiago Juan-Navarro Reinventing history and myth in Carlos Fuentes’s… Resumen Mediante el análisis de dos casos representativos de la ola postmodernista de los años 70 en las Américas (Terra Nostra [1974], de Carlos Fuentes, y Mumbo Jumbo [1972], de Ishmael Reed), se estudia aquí la paradójica tendencia entre algunos autores del boom latinoamericano y del postmodernismo estadounidense a cons- truir novelas “totales”. El estudio de una de las más influyentes novelas del boom (Terra Nostra) en el contexto de la narrativa histórica contemporánea, permite en- tender el impacto de la nueva novela hispanoamericana más allá de sus fronteras y en conexión con otras tradiciones literarias. El trabajo intenta dar respuesta a algu- nas interrogantes cruciales en relación con las prácticas postmodernistas en las Américas, al mismo tiempo que sugiere estrategias para su didáctica dentro de los cursos de Literatura General y Comparada: ¿Qué relación tienen los escritores del boom con el debate en torno al postmodernismo? ¿Cuál es su relación con otras tradiciones subalternas? ¿Cómo pueden haber impactado sus novelas nuestros conceptos de la historia y el mito? ¿Cómo pueden percibirse desde una perspectiva transnacional? Palabras clave: postmodernismo, literatura comparada, narrativa inter-americana, novela total, historia, ficción, didáctica de la literatura. Among all of Carlos Fuentes’s writings, Terra Nostra (1975) represents the culmination of his formal and historical pursuits. In most of his previous works Fuentes had explored the Mexican past and had experimented with self-reflexive forms, but never before had he undertaken such a vast project. In fact, Terra Nostra stands out as the epitome of the Boom writers´ totalizing tendencies. While the 1960s witnessed a long series of monumental novels, none came closer to the purpose and massive scope of Fuentes´ novel. Terra Nostra is, among many other things, an allegorical interpretation of the Iberian experience from the time of the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century and of its impact on the New World, an exploration on the problems of absolute authority in Spain and Latin America, and a meditation on the redeeming power of culture. By the time Fuentes was writing his magnum opus, African American novelist Ishmael Reed was involved in an equally ambitious project, the writing of a novel where he sought to deconstruct Western tradition as a means of displacing the dominant assumptions about the role of Africans and African Americans in history. In Mumbo Jumbo (1972) Reed envisioned a new mythology that undermined stereotypes of African- STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 217-230 Reinventing history and myth in Carlos Fuentes’s… Santiago Juan-Navarro ][ 219 American cultural inferiority while vindicating the value of fiction as performance. Like Fuentes, who deemed to rewrite the history of Spain from the perspective of the colonized, Reed inverted the dynamics of cultural imperialism by imposing a peripheral and marginal perspective upon the hegemonic Judeo-Christian tradition. A comparative analysis of these two texts can help students understand the new forms adopted by historical fiction in the Americas during a decade, the 1970s, that marked the peak of postmodernist fiction. In fact, the significance of Terra Nostra and Mumbo Jumbo exceeds their respective cultural heritages. During the 1980s both were frequently cited to exemplify different (and even dissimilar) concepts of postmodernism. In 1987 Brian McHale referred to Fuentes´ novel as “one of the paradigmatic texts of postmodernist writing, literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices” (16) and as “the most grandiose postmodernist revision of official history” (92). McHale also used repeatedly Mumbo Jumbo to typify postmodern use and abuse of apocryphal history to deconstruct our received versions of the past. Similarly, one year later, Linda Hutcheon would resort to the same two authors (Fuentes and Reed) to illustrate her own concept of postmodernism, and particularly what she considered to be its most paradigmatic literary expression: historiographic metafiction (narratives that blend self-reflexivity and historiographic meditation). While few question the ambition and relevance of Terra Nostra for understanding the evolution of the Latin American new novel, it is a text rarely used in the classroom. The reasons seem obvious to those familiar with the novel. Its length (nearly 800 pages) and panoramic scope (it pretends to revise most of the history of Spain and Latin America as well as many pre-Cortesian myths and the hermetic tradition) has consistently mystified students and professors alike. The fact that several critics regarded the Fuentes´ novel as cryptic and almost unreadable has contributed to keeping the book away from the readings lists of most courses. The novel has thus been relegated to an eccentric position in our curricula. However, as I will show in this essay, Terra Nostra can productively be used in the class as a tool to explore the totalizing trends among many writers of the period. What follows is a proposal for rereading Terra Nostra from an inter-American perspective and in connection with the postmodernism debate. My reflections are mostly based on my own experience teaching Terra Nostra as part of a comparative seminar on historiographic metafiction in the Americas. By analyzing one of the most influential late-Boom novels STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades, 19 (2013) ISSN: 1137-8417, pp. 217-230 220 ][ Santiago Juan-Navarro Reinventing history and myth in Carlos Fuentes’s… (Terra Nostra) in the context of contemporary historical fiction in the Americas, students would be able to understand the narrative practices of the Boom beyond the Latin American borders and in connection with other literary traditions, particularly US postmodern fiction. 1. TERRA NOSTRA, MUMBO JUMBO, AND THE POSTMODERNISM DEBATE IN THE CLASSROOM Terra Nostra and Mumbo Jumbo are paradigmatic of the most dramatic paradoxes faced by postmodernism in the Americas, a key element of contemporary fiction that students need to be familiar with for any course dealing with American (in its broadest sense) narrative. Both fluctuate between self-reflexivity and historical revisionism; between multi-vocal open forms and totalizing projects of representation; between democratic invitations to the reader’s participation and doctrinaire intentions; between an increasing historical relativism and the concomitant need to preserve the past in our memories. This ambivalence is frequently the result of the coexistence of different styles and conflicting ideologies within the works themselves; hence the terms “double view” (Hassan), “double talk” (Hutcheon), and “double coding” (Jencks), used to define postmodernism’s ambiguous repertoire. Fuentes and Reed rather than conceal such paradoxes, bring them to the foreground. Their texts often become forums in which conflicting aesthetic and political ideas are debated. Both novels respond to what Ihab Hassan considers postmodernism’s deconstructionist thrust. Hassan regards the disarticulation of all forms of authority —and especially of all central principles of literature— as the governing principle behind postmodern texts. These works are transgressive in their frequent use of narrative points of view that shatter the basic assumptions of realism. They utilize intrusive narrators who openly discuss the arbitrariness of novelistic conventions and the limitations of any historical perspective. They make use of multiple narrative voices and mobile vantage points that contradict the monologic power of conventional
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